Death to "+1 subscribe" comments: Help needed

It drives us all nuts. People have complained about it for years. How many times has an issue showed up with "new information" your inbox, tracker page, or an issue queue looking like this:

We can finally do something about it... 3281d Consulting and Four Kitchens are teaming up to put an end to this insanity once and for all. Born out of lots of fruitful conversations at DrupalCon DC, we have a strategy and a clear path forward to implement a complete solution to this problem (and a host of related issues). Now all we need is the funding to make it happen. That's where you can help.

In a way, the biggest hurdle has already been accomplished -- we've gotten approval to deploy the amazing flag module on drupal.org. Not only will this make it possible to solve the issue subscription problem, it'll be an important tool in implementing some of the features proposed as part of the drupal.org redesign.

However, completely solving this problem is not as easy as "just turn on flag module, configure some flags, and reconfigure a few issue views." Of course, we do have to do that, and it'll be easy, but that's only a small part of what it's going to take to completely kill "+1 subscribe" comments for good. So long as the issue e-mail subscription feature depends on comments, some people would still add comments to subscribe. There are a number of related problems with the existing e-mail subscription functionality, so if we're going to make it flag-aware, we want to give it the first serious love and attention it's had in many years. For example, wouldn't you like to be able to configure your issue e-mails to only send you the new comment (instead of resending the entire history of the issue) so they work well in threaded mail clients? If we meet our funding goal, that will be a per-user setting.

But that's not the end of the story, either. What about the My recent posts tracker page? It'd almost be worse if flagging an issue made it show up in "My issues" but not in your tracker. So, we need to add flag integration for Tracker2, which is where David Strauss from Four Kitchens comes in. This is going to let us enable flagging forum posts, too, so you can follow a forum topic without commenting.

And, while we're at it -- why stop at flagging issues and forum topics? How about flagging projects for another tab of modules you care about at the My projects page?

As we drew up the detailed battle plans, we saw this isn't going to be a trivial task. So, we're turning to you, the Drupal community, the people who use these tools day in and day out, to contribute and enable us to spend our time on fixing this instead of other paid gigs which make our landlords happy but don't benefit the entire Drupal community. Please donate -- this is one of the oldest and most annoying usability problems on drupal.org itself. The end is near -- death to "+1 subscribe"!

Thanks,
- Derek Wright (dww), Chad Phillips (hunmonk), and David Strauss